TWIBS: No UBI for Trans People… But There Should Be
Earlier this year PolitiFact debunked a rumor about a California town supposedly providing trans residents with UBI. Today I’m asking you: Why shouldn’t they?
Humor by Alyssa Steinsiek
This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s oldest column! Every Friday, Alyssa Steinsiek digs deep from the well of transphobia and finds the most obnoxious, goofy thing transphobes have said or obsessed over during the week and tears it to shreds.
Evil liberal California city offer transgendereded peoples nine hundred dollar a month to be transgendred?! “According to Fox News”?! Call the police! Call the president! Somebody call Hulk Hogan so he can try to rip his shirt off! Nobody look directly into his sad bulldog face, it’s sloughing off as we speak and he’s feeling bad about it!
Okay. This isn’t super recent, but it’s funny, and it’s a helpful springboard for some important points I’d like to make. Let’s get to it.
On Wednesday, Amelia Hansford, reporter for PinkNews, covered an eight month old PolitiFact entry about an Instagram video reacting to a lie about transgender people in Palm Springs, California, receiving nine hundred dollars a month in Universal Basic Income (UBI). Slow news week after the Olympics stuff, I get it. The tl;dr of it all, according to PolitiFact, is that Palm Springs’ city council, working with two nonprofits, DAP Health and Queer Works, selected 30 residents to participate in a UBI pilot program where they would receive $800 a month for up to 18 months. Where both Fox News and that random dude on Instagram got it wrong, predictably, is that the program was not designed exclusively for queer or trans people.
In order to qualify for the program, you had to be a current or prior client of DAP Health or Queer Works (neither of which deny aid to people who aren’t queer), be a resident of Palm Springs, and make less than $16,600 a year. No hard requirements regarding the bending of your gender, as you can plainly see.
I’d also like to point out that, quickly perusing Zillow’s listings for the Palm Springs area, most one bedroom apartments in the area cost between $1,500 and $2,000 per month. Assuming you made exactly $16,600, the cutoff for pilot program participants, and tacked on your bequeathed $800 a month ($9,600 annually), you would clear $26,200 a year before taxes. If you wanted to live by yourself in a dinky one bedroom apartment, that would leave you somewhere between $8,200 and $2,200 a year for utilities, car payments, car insurance, gas, food, clothes, phone services, internet, and other miscellaneous expenses.
Not a lot of wiggle room. I’m guessing most or all of the recipients were, like most Americans, splitting rent with a few other people. There’s no denying that an extra $800 a month would be a welcome relief to any struggling marginalized person, but it isn’t gonna propel them to the lofty heights of the 1%.
So, goofy transphobic lies smashed, debunked and crushed. Good job, team. What now?
Well, why don’t I pose this question: Why would permanent UBI for marginalized people be a bad thing? An absolutely staggering number of trans people face workplace discrimination (27% of trans and gender nonconforming people surveyed, in a study with 27,715 participants, were denied employment or promotion or even fired because of their gender identity), and in particular transgender women make $0.60 for every dollar earned by the average American worker. A quarter of young trans adults (18 to 25) have experienced homelessness.
So why shouldn’t transgender people, or all queer people, receive financial assistance from the government? A two year study in Finland showed that UBI recipients experienced a significant increase to their overall life satisfaction, reporting “better health and lower levels of stress, depression, sadness, and loneliness.” Another UBI study from Stockton, California, resulted in both an increase in physical and mental health, and higher rates of full-time employment; recipients of UBI had more flexibility in approaching a job search, thanks to the financial stress that a guaranteed basic income alleviated.
There are very few good arguments against UBI, and when you consider restricting those sorts of programs to poor and marginalized people, there’s plainly no justification for refusing to institute them. Unless you just hate marginalized people and actively want them to suffer, I guess.
So here’s my suggestion: The US government should start giving every single transgender American $1,000 a month, in perpetuity, for pain and suffering inflicted by both the American public and members of the federal government… or else*.
* Or else I’ll start crying. This is not a threat, it is a promise.
Alyssa Steinsiek is a professional writer who spends too much time playing video games!
